


The Hands Wrapped Around My Throat

by remi_wolf



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Attempted Sexual Assault, Buried Alive, Character Study, Gen, Mike is a Vast fucker, Psychological Torture, Psychological Trauma, Sexual Abuse, Sexual Assault, you can definitely read some of the following into it as well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:08:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22487680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remi_wolf/pseuds/remi_wolf
Summary: Avatars are difficult to kill. That much is made clear and obvious to the Archivist. However, all Avatars must come to the same realization. It is so very difficult to kill them. They might be tortured, beaten, and buried in dirt or concrete by an Avatar of the Hunt, but they will still be kept on the brink, on the knife's edge between life and death. Mike Crew unfortunately underestimated an Avatar of the Hunt's passion for the Archivist, and allowed himself to be buried. This allowed the other Entities to take their time flaying Michael's soul apart while the Vast kept them from becoming the End's victim.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 26
Collections: Beguilements and Distractions





	The Hands Wrapped Around My Throat

**Author's Note:**

> This is a self-indulgent character study on what if Mike Crew didn't actually really die when Daisy "killed" him, because I can't buy that she killed him whatsoever. I mean, seriously. Jon wasn't even a fully-fledged Avatar when the Stranger "killed" him, and he's still fine! So! Character study on Michael Crew's time while being buried under the earth. 
> 
> Now, I know I tagged some sexual assault-y things. I wanna say that this is me taking it as a precaution. There's nothing overt, however! The language I use surrounding the Buried and Michael might come across as sexual assault-y and abuse-y, so I wanted to be on the safe side. Sooooo. Yeah? Hopefully it's interesting?

A long time ago, Michael remembered being told that the Fears were like book genres. 

Romance, Lonely.

Sci-fi, Buried.

Horror, Hunt.

Mystery, Dark.

Fantasy, Vast.

Distinct and beautiful in their own way, but always mixing at the edges. Science fiction that blended in with fantasy gave you one of the most famous series of movies of all time. Horror mixed with romance provided the basis for many famous books as well. On and on it went, until you came around in the circle.  You could even do that with some of the Fears, too. 

The Dark and The Lonely.

The Spiral and the Stranger.

The Slaughter and The Desolation. 

The Hunt and the Slaughter, really.

Unlike book genres, though, some Fears never mixed. 

The Buried was disgusting, and not in the immediate repulsion of the Corruption.  The Vast allowed someone to spread too far, to stretch wings out that they didn’t even realize they had. The Buried simply turned them into worms, pressing and compressing them until they couldn’t think.

He had always considered the Hunt to be an annoyance, but he should never have underestimated just how much of one it was. That damned Avatar of the Hunt, the one he had heard rumors of, that had been killing minor Entities and burgeoning Avatars and Servants of the Fears, had come and tried to kill him. 

Tried. 

She could try. 

She did try. 

Nearly succeeded, too.

At least she seemed overconfident in her abilities, leaving him with a body that the Vast would force back into life. He was the Vast’s precious Avatar. He had  _ chosen _ this fate, unlike that Fairchild, who had stumbled into it. No, Michael had chosen to throw himself into the Vast, fallen in love upon learning about them, and working to give himself to them, rather than allow himself to be taken over by the Spiral that had followed him throughout his life. 

However. 

Being beaten so low by the Hunt meant that he would have to go through the torment of another Entity before he could return home. 

Torture, torment.

Maybe he was being tested. 

It was far more likely he was being tormented.

The Buried was horrible. 

He couldn’t breathe. The dirt clawed and held him like a vice, and poured itself into his mouth every time he tried to drag a breath into his lungs. He longed for the wind, the way terminal velocity would snatch your breath, far more like a kiss than this defilement passing his lips. 

The sky was blue. So, so blue that it nearly looked white. 

The dirt was brown, and black, and red at times when he managed to cough up most of the dirt and it would come out flecked with the blood of his lungs and body. And then it would just be black as he found his way to oblivion. 

Being buried semi-alive ended up with not one, but three Entities torturing him. Pushing to see how far they could take the Vast’s child before he would snap and end up as part of the Spiral or End’s game, as all Avatars eventually ended up. 

The Buried was obvious. He was buried alive, with the press of the Earth binding him and keeping him from being able to breathe or try to claw his way free. 

Mr. Pitch came to visit next. He hadn’t noticed it at first, not with the slavering tongue of the Buried across his body, but soon enough he could feel Mr. Pitch’s hands wrap around his eyes and head regardless, deepening the void surrounding him. He couldn’t hear anything, see anything. The only thing he could do was feel the Buried’s hands across his body, up his legs, keeping him in place. 

The Lonely came after that. After the void of temporary death gave him respit from Mr. Pitch and Mr. Choke, the loneliness started to seep into his bones. Michael had always hated the Lonely the most out of any of the Entities, if only because he had never thought that it was much of a proper Entity in the first place. After all, how could someone be so lonely that they were scared? How isolated would someone have to be to be scared of the  _ isolation _ , rather than that which was keeping them isolated in the first place? He had been alone many times over. When he entered the sky and allowed it to devour him, mind body soul soul soul, he was always alone. 

But this. 

Now he understood the Lonely. 

To be so alone that what had been attempts at breathing became attempts at sobbing, attempts at begging Mr. Pitch to just let him see him, to beg the Buried to adjust the pressure just a little bit, just to see if someone was there. Someone had to be there. He had to be found. Someone had to come. He was a dead, buried body. Someone had to find him. 

He had to be found.

He needed to be found.

He would never be found.

No one would ever find him. 

He was alone. 

Alone. 

So. 

Alone.

  
  


There comes a time in every Avatar’s life that they meet the End. They either meet the End, or they meet the Spiral, and while Michael knew that the Spiral would love to have him, his ritual with  _ Ex Altiora _ having prevented the ball of lightning from ever following him again. 

But that still left the End. 

The End. 

The final moments in which the Vast would loosen its hold on him and allow the most powerful and final of the Entities to drag him into it. The other Avatars might dismiss the notion that they would die at some point, but Michael was not like other Avatars. He, more than anyone else, had chosen to embrace the Vast, and the Vast had whole-heartedly embraced him in return. But that did not mean that his love would be able to keep him away from the End forever. 

All things came to an end.

The End.

Michael knew it was coming. He could see it coming just as he could see his memories of his Vast blue sky fading. First the edges would go pale, and then everything started going grey except for the center. 

The End. 

In the end, Michael stopped struggling. It was only appropriate that he bow to the only worthy Entity capable of taking him. He would let the End steal him away from his sky. He just wished that the Vast would steal his breath away, one last time. Perhaps he would get the sensation of hands pressed against his skin out of his memories before the End stole him away. 

The.

End.

  
  
  


But the End is so rarely the End. 

Especially when a certain idiot Archivist is involved. 

_ Especially _ when he had given said Archivist a statement, and a sensation of fear to include in his Archive.

The world fell apart, and Michael could feel as the seams strained, pressing taut against his soul and the fibers of his being, before snapping. It felt like a breath of fresh air, freeing him. And then he realized that he could see blue surrounding him, and his breath had been stolen with a kiss of wind rushing past his face. 

The light felt like it was blinding, but that, the wind, the feeling of his stomach dropped out from under him, it all helped to remove the phantom feeling of Mr. Pitch of Mr. Choke of the Loneliness. 

Only when the last of the grave dirt had been pulled away from his body and out of his lungs did the Vast sky above settle him back to the ground, and he looked around the new world that he could still feel straining past the seams that had once held the Entities back. 

He looked at the Sky, and the Eye looked back, and he just nodded. 

“Thank you, Archivist.”

Michael Crew looked at the sky that looked back before letting his Vast swallow him whole again to take him to wherever the terror would be most delicious.


End file.
